Lucia's final collapse into full-on, blood-boltered insanity, accompanied by the fabulously weird sound of a glass harmonica, is ironically the only time she's really free of the sexual, emotional and physical brutality with which she is tyrannized by her brother, her lover and her pastor.

Patrick Harper had shouted at them in a voice that would have silenced hell itself, a voice that had called Battalions to order across the vast spaces of windy parade grounds, and the gunners stared with astonishment into the courtyard below where a blood-boltered giant seemed to hold a small cannon in his hands.

That treatment of the character was, doubtless, in part a necessary consequence of Shakespeare's perfunctory adoption of the Tudor doctrine that Richard was a blood-boltered monster; but in a larger degree it was the result of Cibber's vulgar distortion of the original piece.